Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, told Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow that although China is notorious for ripping America off on trade, many other countries are just as guilty.
During an exclusive sit-down interview at the White House with The Alex Marlow Show podcast, Navarro said, “It’s it’s not about China. It’s about the way the world is cheating us.”
“China is certainly the biggest cheater in the world, but the EU–the European Union–and Vietnam run close seconds, as does the problems we have with South Korea and Japan. Cambodia has become a trans shipment point for all the China stuff,” Navarro added.
Marlow noted that Navarro sounded very “Trumpian” on the show, suggesting that all of these countries are on “notice” and that they will “play nice” or suffer the consequences.
The president’s senior counselor on trade said that Trump will stop the “cheating” on trade through reciprocal tariffs against the roughly 25 countries that are taking advantage of the United States.
“We’re going to charge them what they charge us — whether it’s China or the European Union or Mexico or Canada or Brazil,” Navarro stated. “If you look at the trade deficit issue, remember, it’s about a trillion dollars a year. That’s a lot of America you can buy. There’s about 25 of the 125 countries that are responsible for most of the cheating. And we need to have that cheating stop. And the way President Trump is going to do it is with reciprocal tariffs, which are fair.”
During a signing ceremony in the Oval Office last month, Trump announced his intention to impose reciprocal tariffs starting on April 2.
“I have decided, for purposes of fairness, that I will charge a reciprocal tariff, meaning whatever countries charge the United States of America, we will charge them. No more, no less,” Trump explained. “In other words, they charge us a tax or tariff, and we charge them the exact same tax or tariff.”
Speaking to the press aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump said April 2 is “a liberation day” for America “because we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries, including friend and foe.”
The corporate media has desperately tried to blame the 47th president’s tariffs policies for the recent stock turbulence; however, as Breitbart Economics Editor John Carney explained, the recent fluctuations in the market has much more to do with the end of the “government spending boom” that came from the Biden administration. More so, as Carney noted, the Bank of America has argued that the recent selloff has more to do with economic “rotation” than “economic doom.”
“No one around the world will be able to say that what the president is doing is unfair in any way if they simply look at the chess board,” Navarro told Marlow. “What’s unfair is the status quo, and the countries out there that are cheating us are going to do everything to maintain the status quo.”
“It’s unfortunate that a lot of the American media is going to try to help them do that just because they hate Donald Trump more than they love this country,” Navarro added.
As Breitbart News has extensively reported, the United States has a long history of using tariffs to even the international trade playing field.
In the 1980s, for example, President Ronald Reagan impose tariffs when Japan used state-backed industrial policy to boost its semiconductor industry at the expense of the American domestic manufacturers.
The Alex Marlow Show, hosted by Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow, is a weekday podcast produced by Breitbart News and Salem Podcast Network. You can subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Rumble, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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